CHAKRABARTI: I just wanted to share a quick piece of sound from Dr. Kevin Volpp, who is the scientific lead for the American Heart Association’s Health Care by Food Initiative, and he talked with us about the microbiome and how it can really have an impact on your actual decision making.
And if you don’t have a healthy microbiome, how that can create a vicious cycle.
KEVIN VOLPP: It’s important to realize that just how well we feel and how well we function is really influenced by what we eat.
So we can think about fibers and foods, fermented foods like yogurt. There’s a reason why they help you feel better because they support microbes on that are linked to better mood and stress resilience. We also know poor diets cause gut inflammation, which affects systemic inflammation and mood, cognition and memory.
So there’s a lot of linkages between our brains and what we eat that are influenced by your gut microbiome that really affect cognition and mood. And this really matters from a behavioral standpoint because your diet affects your cognitive capacity. How you make decisions, which of course create feedback loops that influence the behavior, which might influence what you eat in the first place.